MUSIC

It all started in 2018 when experimental musician Raquel Bell released a solo record and was invited by Mike Watt to be interviewed on his radio show - The Watt From Pedro Show. Raquel and Jared Marshall (Primary Mystical Experience) just happened to be in Los Angeles at the time. It was the early days of Galecstasy on the road, and they were somewhat living out of the tour van. Raquel and Jared played experimental music and free jazz together after both of them had played in bands and as solo musicians for many years. Raquel asked Mike Watt if they could do his radio show in person at his house, worried that they might not find a good internet connection while bopping from place to place in the tour van. Watt said yes! Galecstasy then drove out to Watt’s hometown of San Pedro, home of the largest port in North America and the birthplace of The Minutemen.

All three musicians sat on Watt’s carpeted living room floor surrounded by incredible records and mementos of music history. Before the live interview began, Watt reached over and held up D. Boon’s guitar and handed it to Raquel. Tears filled her eyes as she strummed, feeling the presence of one of her musical heroes. The Minutemen had influenced most every musician that came across their sound and had immortalized their lead singer, D. Boon as well as their now legendary bassist, Mike Watt. It was in this context that the three of them, Bell, Marshall, and Watt, got to know each other on-air.

Soon after this, in early 2019, Watt brought his Secondmen Trio to play Galecstasy’s music residency at The Grand Star Jazz Club in historic Chinatown, Los Angeles. It was an appropriate second meeting place as the plaza at Sun Mun Way had been the scene of some of the first punk and jazz music in Los Angeles many years before. After the show the three of them agreed to get together again and make a record some day.

They set the date for April 2020 for Watt to travel to Galecstasy’s recording studio in Joshua Tree, California. Nobody knew at the time that the pandemic was coming! Naturally everyone was quite disappointed that the recording had to be rescheduled. But it simply meant that when it did happen it was going to be truly special.

The day finally came In June 2022 and Watt and Galecstasy went into the studio. Primary Mystical Experience had spent time in preparation deciding on which microphones to use, where to place the mics and amps, which compressors, everything was perfectly set in anticipation of the recording session. Raquel Bell had been concocting which synthesizer sounds she wanted for the leads, making detailed notes and settings. The idea was to play completely free - no direction - no bandleader - no songs - nothing decided in advance - just to play in one room together for the first time and see what each musician would bring to the sound. The result of this experimental session is what you hear on “Wattzotica”. Very late that same night the three of them listened back to what they had recorded and a celebration under the desert night sky ensued.

The next morning Raquel awoke and discovered a young rattle snake in a perfect coil taking a nap a few feet away from Watt in the doorway. In that moment she knew that the record was going to be a success. They performed live as a trio for the first time out in the desert at the old Firehouse Outpost later that night.

The music from the recording session was then cut into tracks and mixed by drummer/producer Primary Mystical Experience. Once the record was finally ready it was mastered by Grammy-nominated Joe Lambert Mastering in New York City.

There are fewer great guitar trio records than you'd suspect. Guitar duo sessions are far more abundant, and these three players have all done their share of those. But the dynamics of a trio are more fickle. And when creating collaborative non-hierarchical music, maintaining a balance between three distinct voices is not easy. It requires rapt attention, a fearless approach to entering the unknown, and very good ears to do it successfully. Clearly, Connors, Vallera and Sharp display mastery of all of these conditions and then some. Recorded live at P.I.T. (Property Is Theft) in Brooklyn, When the Moon Is New documents the first meeting for the trio. Loren and Elliott, two of the best known experimenting guitarists on the planet, have a long shared history, dating back to the days of the legendary Chapel Arts Center in New Haven. Elliott appeared there regularly and often did some jamming with Loren on those occasions. Michael Vallera is from a different generation and came of age in a world where players like Loren, Ellliot, Keith Rowe and Derek Bailey had already blown apart any and all notions of the guitar's limitations. His work explores textures, colors and possibilities born from the knowledge that there are no limits to the guitar's sonic possibilities. Together, the three create a beautifully layered universe of sound, as wide open and cosmic as recent images from the Webb Space Telescope. Occasionally I think I can ID some complex pluckery as Sharp's, some blues-canted shimmer as Connor's or some mutli-valent sound sheet as Vallera's, but in truth, this is a excellent example of “fourth mind” creation in the Burroughsian sense. The individual parts played by each of artists combine themselves into something much larger than three commingled streams. There's a gigantic heft to the collective sound that will bowl you over in the best possible way. A truly magnificent record, When the Moon Is New, is an immersive and joyful example of experimental music at its most inviting and evocative. If it doesn't thrill you, I don't know what would. -Byron Coley, 2026

Gondwana Records sign LA bassist and composer Seth Ford-Young’s Phi-Psonics project and announce a remastered deluxe-edition of The Cradle featuring bonus material Phi-Psonics is a meditative, immersive instrumental group from Los Angeles, led by bassist Seth Ford-Young and featuring Sylvain Carton on woodwinds, Mitchell Yoshida on electric piano, and Josh Collazo on drums. Their deeply soulful music draws on jazz and classical influences together with Ford-Young’s own musical experiences, relationships, and his introduction to spirituality, yoga and philosophy at a young age, to create something uniquely its own. Phi-Psonics’ name and ultimate aim is to find ‘Phi’ – the golden mean – in art, nature and self. Ford-Young explains: “It's a bit of a cliché, but music saved my life many times and instilled in me a belief in the great power of healing through art. It is my hope and intention that this music provides healing to someone somewhere.“ Originally from Washington DC area, Ford-Young moved to California in the early 90s and fell in love with the deep sounds of the upright bass and the music of Charles Mingus, John and Alice Coltrane, and Duke Ellington along with Bach, Chopin, Pärt, and Satie. He immersed himself deeply in music and keen to learn combined intense personal study with collaborations, tours, and recordings with artists such as Tom Waits, Beats Antique, and John Vanderslice. In 2010 he moved from the San-Francisco Bay area to the Los Angeles hills and continued his explorations. But great music is rarely just about music and Ford-Young’s meditative, soulful music draws on more than just the twin wellsprings of jazz and classical music: “My mother was a yoga teacher from the early 70's until recently and taught me yoga and meditation at an early age, my stepfather is an Aikido instructor and student of the teachings of Gurdjieff. Those were all early areas of study that I came back to many times throughout my life. Phi-Psonics has been a project that unapologetically synthesizes some of these ideas into our music”. It’s this mixture of influences, musical and extramusical, that gives the music of Phi-Psonics it’s immersive quality and quiet power. Revealingly the music that would become The Cradle, wasn’t written specifically for an album, originally Ford-Young was just writing down what was coming through. As time went by and the album began to take shape, the world situation seemed to be getting darker and his compositions aim to offer hope as a response to the negative influences that abound today. Remarkably for such a beautiful sounding record, it was recorded at the composer’s home, rather than in a studio, but the relaxed nature of this process gives the music an airy lightness that propels the music to some magical spaces. Originally self-released on vinyl in a limited run just as the world went into lockdown, The Cradle reached Matthew Halsall (founder of Gondwana Records) when he aws looking for music for his Worldwide FM show and he was blown away, hearing a kindred spirit at work. Halsall explains: “Phi-Psonics make beautiful, humble and honest music, it’s not showy, but it has a deep vibe that will elevate your mind and soul if you let it. When we heard The Cradle we reached out and are really super delighted to welcome Seth and his band to our label”. Whereas for Ford Young: “Connecting with Matthew and the Gondwana records family has been a light in the darkness of the last years - to have my music make connections even as we are more isolated.” Ford-Young is currently putting the finishing touches to the second Phi-Psonics record, but aware that only a select few had heard The Cradle, let alone had the chance to buy a copy, and entranced by its deceptive simplicity and elevating energy, Halsall suggested that Gondwana present the album as a remastered ‘deluxe edition’ with an extended running time featuring extra tracks and new artwork from Daniel Halsall. The Cradle starts with First Step, perfectly setting the tone for the whole album, it is a beautiful, soulful slice of musical calm gently propelled by Ford-Young’s resonant bass and elevated by sublime flute and Wurlitzer electric piano solos. The seductive title track The Cradle was written way back in 2011 during a time of great personal change that led the composer to a feeling of newness and nurture. The magical, winsome Desert Ride is inspired by many rides through the grandly cinematic Mojave Desert. You can experience how incredibly full of life it’s harsh landscape is if you slow down to its tempo. The gentle, sublime Mama is a tribute to mothers of all kinds, beautiful and heroic. Drum Talk was largely improvised, Ford-Young and the band agreed on a topic and recorded their conversation. Choosing their notes based on how Josh's drums were tuned. Like Glass is named for the special properties of Glass. Like some music, glass is delicate, yet has structure. The first of the two bonus tracks Still Dancing was written during the early days of 2020 in response to the challenges we all were facing then. It's a reminder that the figurative dance continues and that real dancing is essential. And the second, The Searcher, also written as a response to 2020, is a gently hypnotic song about the introspection and growth that can spring from a difficult situation. This then is The Cradle, a quiet self-contained masterpiece, life-affirming and elevating in equal measure and the first offering from a wonderful new voice in spiritual jazz and the latest members of the global Gondwana Records family.

Last heard on Black Truffle as one quarter of the joyously anarchic Bergisch-Brandenburgisches Quartett, Hans Reichel (1949-2011) is one of the great figures of experimental guitar music. Though perhaps lesser known than peers like Derek Bailey, Fred Frith and Keith Rowe, Reichel’s rethinking of the instrument was in some ways the most radical of all. Early on, he dispensed with existing guitars to build a series of his own that explored the use of additional strings and fretboards, moveable pickups, extra bridges, special capos, and other innovations documented in the extensive booklet accompanying this release.

What strikes the listener right from the opening selection on Dalbergia Retusa—‘Return of the Knödler show’, from 1987’s The Dawn of Dachsman—is the extraordinary beauty of Reichel’s music, at once alien in the shimmering sonorities and unconventional pitch relationships made possible by his invented instruments, and deeply lyrical, even romantic in its harmonic content. Growing up in West Germany in the 1960s, Reichel’s formative influences were mainly British and American rock bands, a background that shines through in many of the pieces included here: ‘An old friend passes by’ is haunted by the ghost of Hendrix’s rhythm guitar, and the wild closer ‘Heimkehr der Holzböcke’, taken from a rare 1975 7” and the only piece to use overdubbing, layers errant hammer-on and slide tones over a Canned Heat boogie chug.

Reichel was an important source for the development of Oren Ambarchi’s own extended approach to the electric guitar. Appropriately enough, his selection opens with the very first piece by Reichel he ever heard, on a flexidisc included with a 1989 issue of Guitar Player magazine. Though Reichel collaborated with others extensively in many settings and also performed on violin and his other major contribution to instrument invention, the daxophone, his music for solo guitar remains at the core of his oeuvre.

Focusing exclusively on solo pieces recorded between 1973 and 1988, the 23 pieces on Dalbergia Retusa showcase the range and consistency of Reichel’s work, allowing the listener to see how his performances developed hand-in-hand with his instrumental inventions. On a piece from his very first LP, played on an 11-string instrument (partly strung with piano strings and using a schnapps glass a slide), we hear his intensive exploration of fret-hammering to create zither-like, chiming tone, which Reichel would hone further in later years with a double fretboard guitar specifically designed to be hammered rather than fretted and picked. On a piece from 1979’s Death of the Rare Bird Ymir, Reichel uses two steel-string acoustic guitars at once, with beautiful results: ‘some even say too beautiful’, he jokes in the interview included here. Many of the pieces from the 1980s make use of varieties of the ‘pick behind the bridge guitar’, instruments of uncanny harmonic richness primarily designed to be played on the ‘wrong’ side of the bridge. At times the unexpected behaviour of attacks, resonance, and decay can almost seem electronic, conjuring up the technology-assisted work of Henry Kaiser or even Fennesz, but realised solely through Reichel’s unorthodox techniques on his invented instruments.

Black Truffle is thrilled to present the first ever solo Donso n’goni recording from octogenarian Swedish multi-instrumentalist Christer Bothén. Active in the Swedish jazz and improvisation scene since the 1970s, often heard on bass clarinet, Bothén travelled to Mali in 1971, eventually making his way to the Wassoulou region in the country’s south where he encountered the Donso n’goni, the sacred harp of the hunter caste of Wassoulou society. Though playing the instrument has traditionally been restricted to those who belong to the hunters’ brotherhood, Bothén found an enthusiastic teacher in Brouema Dobia, who, after many months of intensive one-on-one lessons, gave Bothén his blessing to play the instrument both traditionally and in his own style. Returning to Sweden, he would go on to pass on what he had learned to Don Cherry and play the Donso n’goni in a wide variety of inventive settings, including the driving Afro-jazz-fusion of his Trancedance (reissued as BT118).

The seven pieces of Christer Bothén Donso n’goni offer up a stunning showcase of Bothén’s work on this remarkable instrument, heard entirely unaccompanied, except for the final piece where he is joined on a second Donso n’goni by his student and collaborator, the virtuoso bassist Kansan/Torbjorn Zetterberg, and Marianne N’Lemvo Linden on the metal Karanjang scraper. Produced by Johan Berthling (of Fire! & Ghosted) and recorded in three sessions in Stockholm between 2019 and 2023 in richly detailed high fidelity, the instrument’s buzzing, sonorous bass strings make an immediate, overwhelming sonic impression. Hyper-focused on hypnotically repeating pentatonic patterns, the seven pieces are at once relentlessly single-minded and endlessly rich in subtle variations. The concentrated listening environment turns small details, such as the deployment of the instrument’s segesege rattle on two of the pieces, into major events. Six of the seven pieces are traditional, with Bothén contributing the remaining ‘La Baraka’, but the line between tradition and the individual talent is imaginary here: as Bothén explained in a recent interview with The Wire’s Clive Bell, ‘I play traditional and untraditional, and I play the music forward and backward’. While the traditional Wassoulou pieces provide the rhythmic and harmonic elements, Bothén’s individuality as a performer is alive in every moment, felt acutely in boundless variations of attack, improvisational flourishes, and unexpected accelerations and decelerations. Captured entirely live and bristling with spontaneity, this music is undeniably the product of almost half a decade of Bothén’s devotion to the Donso n’goni and its traditional music.

Accompanied by detailed new liner notes by Bothén and stunning colour photos from his time in Mali, Christer Bothén Donso n’goni is a stunning document of a remarkable instrument, played with an almost spiritual intensity by one of contemporary music’s great explorers.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce a tenth anniversary reissue of Oren Ambarchi’s Quixotism, originally released on Editions Mego in 2014. Recorded with a multitude of collaborators in Europe, Japan, Australia and the USA, Quixotism presents the fruit of two years of work in the form of a single, LP-length piece in five parts. Quixotism takes the driving rhythmic aspect of works such as Sagittarian Domain to new levels, with the entirety of this long-form work built on a foundation of pulsing double-time electronic percussion provided by Thomas Brinkmann. Beginning as almost subliminal propulsion behind cavernous orchestral textures and John Tilbury’s delicate piano interjections, the percussive elements (elaborated on by Ambarchi and Matt Chamberlain) slowly inch into the foreground of the piece before suddenly breaking out into a polyrhythmic shuffle around the halfway mark, and joined by master Japanese tabla player U-zhaan for the piece’s final, beautiful passages. The pulse acts as thread leading the listener through a heterogeneous variety of acoustic spaces, from the concert hall in which the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra were recorded to the intimacy of crys cole’s contact-mic textures. Ambarchi’s guitar itself ranges over this wide variety of acoustic spaces, from airless, clipped tones to swirling, reverberated fog. Within the complex web Ambarchi spins over the piece’s steadily pulsing foundation, elements approach and recede in a non-linear fashion, even as the piece plots an overall course from the grey, almost Nono-esque reverberated space of its opening section to the crisp foreground presence of Jim O’Rourke’s synth and Evyind Kang’s strings in its final moments. Formally indebted to the side-long workouts of classic Cologne techno, the long-form works of composers such as Éliane Radigue and the organic push and pull of improvised performance, Quixotism is constantly in motion, yet its transitions happen slowly and steadily, often nearly imperceptible, the diverse elements which make up the piece succeeding one another with the logic of a dream. At the time of its first release, Quixotism was clearly a summation of Ambarchi’s work in the years leading up to it. Now, listening back a decade later, it also seems like an arrow pointing to the future, suggesting paths that would be explored further in works to come: the pulsating guitar layers of Hubris, the album-length collaboration with Jim O’Rourke and U-zhaan on Hence, Shebang’s joyous layering and percussive drive. Now sounding better than ever in a new remaster by Joe Talia, the time is ripe to rediscover its quixotic charms.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce For McCoy, a new work by Eiko Ishibashi dedicated to the widely loved character of Jack McCoy, portrayed by Sam Waterston in Law & Order. Following on from Hyakki Yagyō (BT064), For McCoy finds Ishibashi further exploring the unique space she has carved out in recent years, bringing together musique concrète techniques, ECM-inspired jazz, lush layers of synths and hints of pop into immersive and affecting structures crafted in her home studio, aided by a group of close collaborators. Beginning with overlapping layers of descending flute lines, the expansive ‘I Can Feel Guilty About Anything’ (whose two parts stretch out over more than thirty minutes) unfolds with a free-associative logic, embracing dreamlike transitions and unexpected cinematic cuts. As a hovering cloud of synthetic tones and multi-tracked voices fans out from the spare opening moments, Joe Talia’s skittering cymbals settle into a gently propulsive groove, soon joined by melodic fragments performed by Daisuke Fujiwara on multi-tracked saxophone. As the drums cede to field recordings and ominous synth figures, the uncommon meeting of saxophone and electroacoustic techniques call to mind the more spacious moments of Michel Redolfi and André Jaume’s Synclavier-propelled oddity Hardscore or the early work of Gilbert Artman’s Urban Sax. As the piece continues on the LP’s second side, distant dialogue rumbles beneath a surface of processed flutes, blurring into a cavernously reverberant backdrop for stark ascending lines performed by MIO.O on violin. Eventually, the piece settles into a gorgeous passage of abstracted dream pop, where Ishibashi’s multitracked vocal harmonies glide atop synth chords, errant pings and snatches of outdoor sound. Fragments of melodic material reappear throughout the spacious opening piece, finally stepping to the forefront on the closing track, ‘Ask Me How I Sleep at Night’. Here, over a shuffling groove supplied by Jim O’Rourke on double bass and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto on drums, layers of flutes, saxophones and guitars sound out melodies whose combination of twisting irregularity and soulful immediacy calls up prime Keith Jarrett, while their closely voiced harmonies suggest Kenny Wheeler or even Wayne Shorter’s Atlantis. In a classical gesture of closure, the web of melodic lines eventually leads back to the descending flute figures with which the record began. Presented in an immersive, impeccably detailed mix by Jim O’Rourke and arriving in a sleeve featuring Ishibashi’s beautiful drawings of Jack McCoy, For McCoy is an essential release for anyone following the enchanted and unique path being forged by Eiko Ishibashi.

Paradigm-shifting percussionist Valentina Magaletti stops time on 'La Tempesta Colorata', a long-form set that rolls thru tempos and time signatures with gymnastic flexibility, offering another spectacular entry to A Colourful Storm’s gravity-defying recent run of releases. Magaletti is a regular and constant presence on these pages as a member of Moin, Vanishing Twin, Tomaga and CZN, as well as thru endless collabs with everyone from Floating Points to Nicolas Jaar, Jandek to Helm. For our money, though, she's at her most arresting when operating in solo mode. "La Tempesta Colorata" was recorded at Cafe Oto in October 2021 and follows her astonishing 2020 solo set "A Queer Anthology of Drums” with a virtuoso performance that never drags for a moment, fluctuating from ASMR scraping to angular post-punk rhythmic pulsewerk. With a full drum set, a handful of additional small instruments and a delay pedal, Magaletti somehow captures a full spectrum of sound, employing only minor additional elements to flesh out her sound. From the dewdrop swagger of the opening minutes, thru rolling tom-led seismic activity - complete with customary screams - and into echoing industrial dub-improv experimentation, she's able to assemble her rhythms with metronomic accuracy, but with enough space in the gaps to enhance inherent human qualities - a far cry from fully electronic studio productions. It’s a spellbinding display of polymetric complexities where no two seconds repeat themselves, persistently pulling patterns apart and restitching them in diffractive slow-fast-slow temporalities that arc from showers of cascading hi-hats, to pugilistic breaks, to an unexpected trough of Twin Peaks-y drones around the mid-section, only to climb out of it via icicles of melodic chimes and into more humid areas of her imagination, ultimately shoring up in pitch black Amazonian zones. If you're into anyone from Autechre to Eli Keszler, Milton Graves to Han Bennink, this one's a mindmelt.

Each cassette in this trilogy is based off over a decade of audio-spiritual research on three beings who have created highly spiritual musical compositions, and who have transitioned off this planet in the physical: Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane (Swamini Turiyasangitananda), and Sun Ra. You will hear two ensembles - Roman Norfleet & Be Present Art Group as well as The Cosmic Tones Research Trio - play interpretations, responses, and hypotheses pertaining to the research on the music and message of those beings. Each cassette is simultaneously in tribute and is also a sonic dissertation. These cassettes are intended as future research on how the music of these beings affected the playing, the witnesses, and the hearers at the time of performance.

The first cassette "Something’s Happening: The Transitioning of a Pharoah" centers the beingness and music of Pharaoh Sanders. This recording took place on the day of his transition (9-24-22) at The Lumber Room in Portland, Oregon and features the ensemble Roman Norfleet & Be Present Art Group. The news of Pharaoh’s transition stunned the whole planet. The ensemble had different compositions prepared for this day originally, but immediately made new sonic arrangements in response, prayer, grief, and gratitude. Norfleet had a formative encounter with Sanders around 2013 while working as a computer salesman and learned about the music of Sanders directly from him. They spent hours in conversation on technology and music, which included talks about Sun Ra.

The second cassette is titled "Explorations of Turiya Loka" and was recorded at Leach Botanical Garden in Portland, Oregon (9-24-23). "Turiya" is a spiritual, blissful state and "Loka" means planet - according to Vedic spiritual systems. Turiya Loka is a spiritual, blissful planet. This cassette holds a recorded ceremony by Roman Norfleet & Be Present Art Group honoring the music and spiritual teachings of Swamini Turiyasangitananda (also known as Alice Coltrane) and explores what Turiya Loka may sound like. Turiya Loka is a home for Swamini Turiyasangitananda based on her song “Om Supreme” on the album Eternity. Since 2017, Norfleet has been studying and fellowshipping with the students of Swamini Turiyasangitananda who are based in California and still run the Vedantic Center organization. The organization continues to hold classes and ceremony. In this recording, listeners will get a chance to hear spiritual insight from Radha Botofasina, who is a student of Swamini Turiyasangitananda and lived on the ashram the spiritual teacher founded in Agoura Hills, California.

The final cassette consists of music from The Cosmic Tones Research Trio composed of Harlan Silverman, Kennedy Verrett, and Norfleet. It was recorded in community at Mississippi Records in Portland, Oregon (12-3-23). The ensemble's name gives a nod to Sun Ra’s "Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy" album title and was formed for extensive research purposes pertaining to universal and cosmic tones - how they affect human mental wellness and overall interspecies wellbeing. Sun Ra’s "Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy" is a great example and research tool for audio wellness. The evening of this concert was the trio’s first mental wellness event which had tremendous positive effects on the beings and buildings present and surrounding.

This is a solo percussion work recorded in 1980 and released in 1981 by Masahiko Togashi, one of Japan’s foremost percussionists and drummers. After the accident that left him partially paralyzed, Togashi developed his own techniques and performance methods, using drums, bells, gongs, and a wide range of percussion instruments to capture the unique sound world he envisioned. This album documents that deeply personal sonic exploration.

Somewhere in the Wind is the third record that Loren Connors and I have made together. Of the three, it’s the first that consists exclusively of electric guitar duos and it’s the first that was recorded live. To me it feels very much like a live record; this music happened in crowded rooms in Brooklyn on two dates in 2025 and there’s an urgency to connect with others and a pleasure in doing so that can be heard on both of these tracks. On the first of our duo records (Arborvitae, 2003) I primarily play piano, and on the second (Evening Air, 2024) we switch off on piano and guitar. Both of those albums bespeak the privacy of the recording studio, where time is suspended and one can explore the quietest of sounds. By contrast, Somewhere in the Wind is the noisiest, most raucous and most free of our duo records. It’s the sound of us taking it to the stage. I became a fan of Loren’s playing from the moment that I first heard it, after happening upon a beat-up copy of In Pittsburgh circa 1992 in a used bin in the Dr. Wax record store in Chicago where my then-bandmate Bundy K. Brown worked. Everyone has taken a chance on a record because it looked interesting and wouldn’t set you back too much. In that regard In Pittsburgh was the find of a lifetime. I had just switched from playing in a postpunk power trio (Bastro) to making mostly drummerless respect-your-neighbors music (Gastr del Sol), and Loren’s pacing and touch and his lovely, unaffected compositions had me from the first listen. Not long after that, Jim O’Rourke and I reissued In Pittsburgh on our Dexter’s Cigar label, and I fondly remember first meeting Loren in New York’s Grand Central Station—so glamorous for this country mouse—and taking the train upstate with him where he shared a bill with Gastr del Sol. During soundcheck, Jim, Loren, and I played together for a bit and Loren’s approach to the instrument was something that one could instantly sink into, the kind of situation where there are no mistakes. I still feel that when we play together.

A masterpiece by Masahiko Togashi, Masayuki Takayanagi, Motoki Takagi, and Motoharu Yoshizawa—some of the most important artists in the history of Japanese free jazz. Takayanagi’s guitar, which makes effective use of feedback techniques; Takagi’s dynamic tenor saxophone and corn pipe (a type of vertical flute); Yoshizawa’s string sounds, which are so free they seem almost effortless; and Togashi’s intelligent drumming, which combines precision with power—all come together to create a landmark album that truly heralds the dawn of a new era!

Epic 2 hour trip of astral-planing, ambient psychedelia shimmering with displaced traces of pop, slurred acid grooves and ample flange. Definitely one for the road or rail trip this summer, and FFO The KLF, Fennesz, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Eno. “From the edges of a hallucinatory torpor, Rue des Garderies continue their explorations in psychedelia — Femacosmé presents here a new piece recorded live at the Pe:rsona festival, at Domaine des Éveils in the summer of 2025. An adventure guided by blur, the intangible, the impermanent, where layers, voices, sounds, and organic and synthetic echoes resonate, emerge, then fade away — as if to deceive reality, or at least our perception of it. More than two semi-improvised hours in which Rue des Garderies (Sweetzak, Désiré Bonaventure & Vasco Cesaretti) summon us to an astral yet motionless journey — somewhere between ambient, IDM, and post-pop.”

Glorious vinylization of this 2022 duo session, originally issued as a cassette, documenting the first time Suzuki and Noyes ever collaborated. Ayami Suzuki has become known to cognoscenti for her brilliantly imagined vocal improvisations, through recordings with like-minded folks such as French vocalist/polymath Delphine Dora and avant hurdy gurdy player, TOMO. Rob Noyes has developed a parallel reputation as a master third-generation acoustic guitarist in the post-Takoma tradition. Originally based in the U.S. he wisely relocated to Tokyo several years ago. Which is where this meeting took place, And while I initially assumed the music had been composed to some degree. Rob assured me that was not true, He says, “I think the recording can seem like something we took a lot of time with and discussed/composed to some degree, but we actually just agreed to meet at a rehearsal studio. It took a little more than an hour to track it all, without ever having played together before or even really discussing the approach we were going to take. I just tuned my guitar to a different tuning for each one and we let it roll.” The results kinda speak for themselves, but I was blown away by the notion they had never collaborated previously. The intimate nature of their blend recalls such long-time collusionists as Tim Buckley & Lee Underwood or Loren Connors & Suzanne Langille. Rob's delicate instrumental arcs create a perfect net for Ayami's vocals, which are usually wordless (although they always feel weighted with emotional content). It's a mesmeric pairing of voices. Which I can only hope is the first of many. Classic Fevers and Chills is a perfect soundtrack for spring, Unconditionally magical. --Byron Coley, 2026

Originally released in 1989 as Violin Solo. Sept. 3-4, '89. Takehisa Kosugi's improvisations, both with violin and miscellaneous sounding objects, have a sense of emerging from the bottom of a spiritual unconscious. From this place comes a music based more on the feeling of sounds than conscious arrangement. Memory, physical action, tactile perceptions, environmental conditions, and awareness of subconscious microcosmic and macrocosmic extremes inform his work as much as the intention to assemble sounds into music. When listeners connect with his sounds, a direct identification of experience occurs between audience and performer. Personnel: Takehisa Kosugi - electric violin.

"As expected, the set began with some brain-blasting brutal noise [...] Although Merzbow is known for his extreme electronics, he is much more diverse and creative than most give him credit for. The best part of the set was when both Merzbow and Mats [Gustafsson] worked more carefully with their electronics while Mr. Pándi played some cerebral, shifting currents on his drums [...] which brought this set to a grand climax [...]". » GALLANTER, Bruce. « Downtown Music Gallery », June 2018 "The festival concluded—climactically and cathartically—with a bracing wall of sound, noise and fury from the trio of Gustafsson, the mystical Japanese noise master Merzbow and impressive young Hungarian drummer Balázs Pándi.". » WOODARD, Josef. « DownBeat », May 27, 2018 "If you've seen Merzbow perform live, a question you probably wouldn't ask is, "How can we make that louder?" Well, the answer comes in the form of sax monster Mats Gustafsson and a relative newcomer, Hungarian drummer Balázs Pándi." » HILL, Eric. « Exclaim! », May 20, 2018

SML is a Los Angeles based quintet featuring Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Booker Stardrum, and Gregory Uhlmann.

'Spontaneous Music Live' contains two side-length pieces of unedited improvisation, recorded live at Los Angeles venue Zebulon during SML's December 2025 three-night residency, just weeks after the release of the band's second album HOW YOU BEEN. It was recorded and mixed live to analog tape by Bryce Gonzales (the same engineer/wizard known for his gorgeous live captures/mixes of Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet).

Between HOW YOU BEEN and their 2024 debut SMALL MEDIUM LARGE (both of which were heavily edited, shaped and post-produced) the band has developed a reputation for records that are heavily fused, polished, and punchy. The medium is on full post-modern display on those LPs, and the band’s post-production knife can be responsible for much of the perspective — the tastiest morsels collected, arranged, and rearranged just so.

But the source material from both those albums were live recordings. Long-form, unwieldy, ebbing and flowing. On top of that, every performance the band has ever done has been fully improvised in that spirit. So in the sphere of live performance the band’s esteem has grown down a different path — one of linear, hypnotic, expansion. It’s a perceived split persona shared by some of SML’s most inspiring conceptual bedfellows: compare the extended madness of Can’s 'Live in Paris 1973' to the relative tight form of 'Future Days' from the same year; the speed-funk chaos of Miles Davis’ 'Dark Magus' to the heavily deconstructed 'On The Corner' or 'Big Fun'.

'Spontaneous Music Live' removes the curatorial perspective and pulls the curtain back on that search-pluck-reconstruct editing process. What we’re left with is the psychedelic realism of the band in situ, in their home town, collectively improvising, fully in-the-moment, mining for that moment of discovery. We hear, in macro, each nugget of sound which could be the basis for a future SML album track, spattered amongst the collective chaos-and-control like stars in the night sky.

SML is a Los Angeles based quintet featuring Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Booker Stardrum, and Gregory Uhlmann.

'Spontaneous Music Live' contains two side-length pieces of unedited improvisation, recorded live at Los Angeles venue Zebulon during SML's December 2025 three-night residency, just weeks after the release of the band's second album HOW YOU BEEN. It was recorded and mixed live to analog tape by Bryce Gonzales (the same engineer/wizard known for his gorgeous live captures/mixes of Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet).

Between HOW YOU BEEN and their 2024 debut SMALL MEDIUM LARGE (both of which were heavily edited, shaped and post-produced) the band has developed a reputation for records that are heavily fused, polished, and punchy. The medium is on full post-modern display on those LPs, and the band’s post-production knife can be responsible for much of the perspective — the tastiest morsels collected, arranged, and rearranged just so.

But the source material from both those albums were live recordings. Long-form, unwieldy, ebbing and flowing. On top of that, every performance the band has ever done has been fully improvised in that spirit. So in the sphere of live performance the band’s esteem has grown down a different path — one of linear, hypnotic, expansion. It’s a perceived split persona shared by some of SML’s most inspiring conceptual bedfellows: compare the extended madness of Can’s 'Live in Paris 1973' to the relative tight form of 'Future Days' from the same year; the speed-funk chaos of Miles Davis’ 'Dark Magus' to the heavily deconstructed 'On The Corner' or 'Big Fun'.

'Spontaneous Music Live' removes the curatorial perspective and pulls the curtain back on that search-pluck-reconstruct editing process. What we’re left with is the psychedelic realism of the band in situ, in their home town, collectively improvising, fully in-the-moment, mining for that moment of discovery. We hear, in macro, each nugget of sound which could be the basis for a future SML album track, spattered amongst the collective chaos-and-control like stars in the night sky.

Ellen Arkbro’s fourth album, Nightclouds, collects five improvisations for solo organ, recorded across Central Europe in 2023–24.

"Nightclouds is more unabashedly Romantic and introspective than her previous efforts, though it remains firmly rooted in the rigor and precision that have come to define Arkbro’s concept. Extending her previous explorations of spatialized harmony, tactility, and texture,

Arkbro draws equally on sacred music, ECM–style jazz, and downtown minimalism, conjuring a cool intimacy and tone. Her decelerationist chordal improvisations envelop the listener in dirge-like washes, while her close miking reveals the rough haptic grain of the reeds, bringing the listener both inside and outside the sound. Evoking Kjell Johnsen and Jan Garbarek’s duets, or La Monte Young and Tony Conrad’s take on Euringer and Harmer’s cowboy song “Oh Bury Me Not,” Nightclouds channels spiritual pathos through a rigorously restrained architecture.

Following up on last year’s Sounds While Waiting (W.25TH, 2024), a selection of stereo mixes documenting Arkbro’s spatial organ installations, Nightclouds shifts direction, focusing on instant composition and improvisation. Elegant, simple chordal scaffolds support rich, ever-shifting textures; listening closely necessitates surrender to sustained irresolution. Bookending a collection of short pieces are two variations on the titular composition, “Nightclouds,” which is a sly nod to British jazz guitarist Allan Holdsworth: The first take slows down and stretches out a continuously modulated harmonic progression, while the short closing version simply loops three chords. Situated between these tracks are “Still Life” and “Chordalities,” two short works recorded at the Temple de La-Tour-de-Peilz in Vevey, Switzerland. The second half of the album is given to “Morningclouds,” a sprawling work recorded in the reconstructed Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church) in Berlin. Arkbro’s concise musical vocabulary and formal architecture evoke a sense of emotional ambivalence, simultaneously uplifting and mournful, guiding the listener through a spectrum of feeling with a cool and distant beauty. Nightclouds stands as a profound statement in Arkbro’s evolving body of work, at once introspective and expansive, the album reaffirms her singular ability to transform harmonic simplicity into deeply affecting sonic landscapes, inviting listeners into a space of contemplation and emotional depth.

Simplicity floods itself in textured imperfection and anointed noise on the debut oracular folk guitar album released under the UK's 5 Gate Temple. A roughly recorded stack of improvisations on a classical-style guitar, God Spill embodies the broken, all while un-doing the expectations around traditional guitar folk. Mingot's fingerpicked tones meld with unsteady pedal loops and hissed drones rotating through flawed circuitry. A slow to becoming repair that is translucent, cryptic and oblique. Mingot's misty glitched landscape paints the polarity of both presence and disappearance, all cyclically mirroring the unseen. Honesty, discordance, impatience, and certainty all find home alongside blurred vocals. Since 2022, the EU-based, Queens NYC native has released music elusively as hardcore high priestess St Agnis and now swims waters of the acoustic - with soft rage and pursuit.

Imagine it’s late afternoon, you’re outside by the lake, and there’s sunlight on the water. This is the peaceful and contemplative scene that Matt Gold and Resavoir set on their collaborative LP Horizon. Across 10 lush and exploratory tracks, it’s the product of two Chicago-based musicians—Will Miller, the acclaimed trumpeter, composer, and producer who’s worked with SZA, Whitney, and more, and Gold, a seasoned multi-instrumentalist and accomplished guitarist—effortlessly combining their distinct sensibilities for something hypnotic and tangibly inviting. What started as a love letter to their shared admiration for ‘60s and ‘70s Brazilian music evolved into a dynamic and sprawling body of work. These sunny and expansive tunes are as immersive as they are endlessly replayable.

Both Miller and Gold attended Oberlin College’s Conservatory of Music together and in the years after graduating, they orbited each other around Chicago’s music communities. “We were showing up for each other as friends and taking an interest in each other's projects, noticing a lot of resonances and similarities working within in our music,” says Gold, who’s collaborated with artists like Makaya McCraven and Jamila Woods and stretched the bounds of jazz and Americana on solo albums Imagined Sky and Midnight Choir. “We had talked so much about eventually working together that it was almost like an ongoing bit at a certain point,” says Miller. Though they had known each other for over a decade, they first had their chance on “Inside Minds,” the breezy lead single on 2023’s Resavoir. While those sessions were remote, two had palpable chemistry.

It wasn’t until Miller left the touring band of the Chicago group Whitney in 2023 that their plans to make music together in person came to fruition. “When I first started Resavoir, I was chasing the desire to produce records and now that I had time to focus exclusively on that, Matt was the first person I called to come to the studio,” says Miller. The two had bonded over an admiration for the Brazilian guitarist Luis Bonfa and songwriter Milton Nascimento, especially the latter’s work with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, so they decided to use nylon string guitar as a starting point for these early sessions. “Canopy,” which opens Horizon, was the earliest track. Kicking off with bright acoustic chords, the song slowly unfurls into a slinking groove, samples, and fluttering leads from soprano saxophonist Tim Bennett.

As these initial experiments proved successful, Gold and Miller felt they could broaden the scope of their vision. “We were initially conceiving of it as this acoustic guitar driven record but eventually we wanted to frame it orchestrally and see how many shades and colors we can bring in around that sound,” says Gold. “Dewy” thrives within this orchestral palette of woozy synths, strings from Macie Stewart, Claire Chenette’s oboe, flautist Wills McKenna, and French horns from Lloyd Billingham. “We discovered that our multi-instrumentalist mentalities—using piano and bass, samplers, drum grooves, guitar ideas all as starting points— nurtured the broad orchestration across this record,” says Miller.

“The LP took about a year with on-and-off sessions,” says Miller. “The songs benefit from letting them ferment for a couple months, coming back to it, and seeing what sort of new flavors have developed.” Co-produced by Miller and Gold (and mixed by Dave Vettraino), Horizon proudly reflects the artists’ vast artistic community and musical network in Chicago and beyond. Along with Gold, Eddie Burns (Clairo), Peter Mannheim (Tony Glausi), and Carter Lang (SZA, Lil Nas X) provide drums and percussion throughout. On the dreamlike single “Diversey Beach,” New York songwriter Mei Semones lends vocals and along with her band members Noah Leong and Claudius Agrippa, collaborated on a mesmerizingly conversational string arrangement. “We wrote "Diversey Beach" on the coldest day of the year watching a blizzard coming down out of the window, where the sounds of the cars driving by sounded like waves crashing on a beach,” says Miller. “I sent it to Mei Semones, who I’ve been a fan of for a long time. She's absolutely incredible and it’s amazing what she did with it.”

Horizon is a testament to the feeling of endless possibilities that come from collaboration. It’s a remarkable synthesis of two artists who share musical community and an artist lineage but have carved their own paths in unique ways. Nowhere is this more evident than “Hazel Canyon,” which boasts Gold’s silky pedal steel and a subtly enveloping arrangement that evokes Erasmo Carlos. “Musically, we're always trying to capture a fleeting moment of infinite expanse, feeling the vastness of things while knowing they'll always change,” says Gold. “This record keeps the light reflecting on the water just a little longer -- our collaborative process running through the backbone of these songs and rippling out in so many beautiful directions..”

‘vernacular’ is the debut studio album by improvisation-based artist, and founder of life is beautiful, aloisius. built entirely from layers of improvised instrumentation recorded via laptop microphone, using various instruments such as: guitar, piano, cello, trumpet, saxophone, drums & voice. vernacular is inspired by the spirit of collective improvisation, and embodies aloisius' instinctual & organic approach to musical composition. crafted solely by aloisius (except for track 6, which features a layer of piano by life is beautiful member, friend & collaborator Bianca Scout). "Crisp, chaotic and unashamedly euphoric, it's fully human, packed with irresistible flaws and delusions that can't help but keep us completely gripped." (Boomkat) physical editions will feature a secret unlisted bonus track. to celebrate the release of the album, a semi-improvised interpretation of the project will be performed live by ‘orchestra379’ (a collective improvisation project curated by aloisius, consisting of a fluctuating lineup that differs on each occasion of performance). this iteration of orchestra379 shall feature: Isaiah Hull (vocals), abi asisa (cello), Jasper Maurice (guitar), Bianca Scout (organ), Damsel Elysium (violin), BJ Holy (trumpet & flugelhorn) & aloisius (drums & saxophone). preluding the orchestra379 performance will be a special, intimate performance by May Kershaw (of the band Black Country, New Road), performing using voice & church organ.

Originally released in 2005, Out To Lunch by Otomo Yoshihide’s New Jazz Orchestra (ONJO) is a bold, track-by-track homage that reimagines Eric Dolphy’s legendary 1964 album of the same name. Bringing together the early members of ONJO, this record serves as the most vivid manifestation of Otomo’s "New Jazz" concept at the time—placing a jazz orchestra, free improvisation, and electronic textures on the exact same stage.

Psychedelic sorcerers Nuke Watch return with a definitive blast of improvised studio shenanigans on London’s Sagome, after celebrated turns with TTT, PPM, and patience. Proper outerzone madness, tipped FFO Pekka Airaksinen, Wolf Eyes, Marshall Allen, Sperm. Expanding from a duo to a trio with the addition of Zack Stafford on wind and electronics, Nuke Watch emulate the effects of some legit Lucy for a particularly skewiff and trippy session on their 8th studio album ‘Fusion’. The key to the LP is in the titular nod to psych jazz and rock hybrids of the ‘70s, where styles began to melt into one another via the extraordinary musical virtuosity of the likes of King Crimson, Tony Williams, and John McLaughlin. But rather than overly intricate key changes and showmanship, Nuke Watch distill a confluence of inspirations - contemporary urban beats, dub, trip metal, outernational trance, US basement noise, raga drone - with an alchemic, imaginative ingenuity they can safely call their own. The trio, plus the likes of Daryl Seaver on EWI MIDI and instrument, a la Marshall Allen or Wolf Eyes, giive it hot and sticky with a flow of intuitive ideas best representing a prolific creative practice of open-ended jams. But again, they deftly sidestep the more hoary connotations of psych with a freezer fresh zing and grasp of groove that, just about, lets us know it’s the 2020s, not the 1970s, or at least somewhere along that timeline. This uchronic approach, factored by extramusical prompts from psyops, eschatology, and contemporary political clusterfucks, yields a brace of hypnotic, hallucinatory projections in progression from the swingeing groove and smeared apparitions of the opener, thru the mutant raga of the ‘War Lock’ section, to a properly unbuckled ‘New American Psycho’ movement squirming in space between Sperm and Wolf Eyes’ trip metal.